Research

Research finding summaries

Who Teaches Politics Now? Universities, YouTube, and the Making of Common Sense

As unions, parties, and public institutions retreat from political education, platforms like YouTube increasingly colonize the space they leave behind. Individualistic explanations circulate widely and effortlessly, carried by algorithms designed to turn attention, outrage, and certainty into profit. Over time, inequality comes to be understood as the outcome of personal choices, while success reads as evidence of merit. Structural explanations, by contrast, are recast as ideological, excessive, or out of touch with ordinary life.

By |May 13, 2026|
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Rethinking Radicalization: American Parties and Movements in the 1960s and 1970s

Ultimately, this comparison problematizes the assumption that radicalization is inherently destructive and incompatible with American party politics. Hegemonic parties with robust resources can nurture radicals and substantively integrate their ideas, avoiding the process of dilution that is characteristic of the Democrats’ listless interest-group configuration.

By |May 6, 2026|
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Egypt’s Failed Democratic Transition: Why the Labour Movement Matters

A central lesson is that labour movements will be in a better position to shape political outcomes decisively if they build independent organisations with real strategic capacity. The absence of such organisational strength in Egypt was a key reason why the post-Mubarak order did not evolve in a more democratic direction.

By |Feb 3, 2026|
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Owning the Libs, One Survey at a Time: On the Attitudes of American Socialists

The evidence presented above suggests that not only do socialist identifiers differ significantly in their social and political beliefs from non-socialist identifiers in general, but they also differ significantly from those conventionally acknowledged as the beginning and end of the American ideological left: liberals.

By , |Nov 17, 2025|
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Women and Class Struggle: A Marxist Study of Pakistan’s Trade Union and Women’s Movements

In my book Women and Class Struggle (English translation forthcoming December 2025), I explore the historical, social, and class-based connections between Pakistan’s trade union movement and women’s rights activism. At first glance, these two areas may appear separate: trade unions are largely male-dominated, while women’s movements, often led by [...]

By |Nov 7, 2025|
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Workers’ Political Consciousness in Demobilized Class Societies: Redistribution, Recognition and Representation

How are we to understand working-class consciousness under current conditions? We argue that in this conjuncture, the dominant form of workers’ consciousness is a moral sense of injustice, a protest against violations of an implicit social contract. The reactive scandalization of broken promises and violated expectations, rather than systematic ideological edifices, dominate as a modus operandi of workers’ political consciousness today.

By , |Oct 8, 2025|
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Slush of Chicago: Winter Parking at the Cross-streets of Public-Private Predation

Meet John Biggs. On December 1, 2022, he awoke to discover his car gone. As a carpenter who keeps tools in the trunk, no wheels meant no work. No work meant no income. No income meant problems. Later Biggs would learn his car towed on [...]

By |Sep 11, 2025|
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“Indian, Black and Irish” in Viewing Capitalism, Genocide, and Racism

In developing a summary of my recent book – Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions 1492 – 1790 – I focused on the interplay between capitalism, genocide, and racism. I was struck by how each of four distinct epochs over the past 500 years of [...]

By |May 21, 2025|
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Why Activists Need Critical Communism

Last spring, encampments filled campuses, protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza and university complicity. Now people are in the streets protesting the elimination of jobs and opposing deportations. Others have been fighting climate change. The summer of 2020 saw millions in the streets of the U.S. and many other [...]

By |Apr 15, 2025|
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Dead medics and collapsing hospitals: the situation in Gaza

April 7, 2025 is “World Health Day.” According to the World Health Organization, its aims to promote “healthy beginnings” and “hopeful futures” for people worldwide. Juxtapose those aspirations to a quote from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, just one week earlier, which read: “They [...]

By |Apr 7, 2025|
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